According to Cecil Johnson, “Those participating in the creation of the party were the Espártaco organization, the Communist Rebel Union, and revolutionary militants who had broken with the revisionist party.”[240] The founding congress of the PCRCh had been preceded by local and regional meetings, where the documents to be adopted at the congress were discussed.
Those documents included a political resolution. According to Johnson, it “reiterated the Chinese views regarding the international situation.” It also strongly attacked the “neutralist position which Fidel Castro and his party then held in the Sino-Soviet dispute.”
The political resolution also endorsed the Chinese concept of a “two-stage” revolution. It likewise asserted that “there was only one road to power, and that was the road to armed struggle in the form of a people’s war, the essential feature of which would be a protracted armed struggle.”[241]
The PCRCh soon made clear its endorsement of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In May 1967 it sent a letter to Mao Tse-tung that called the Cultural Revolution “the greatest political and revolutionary social event in our times, to which only the October Revolution and the Chinese itself are comparable.”[242]
In January 1969, the Peking Review devoted a full page to commentary on an editorial about the Great Cultural Revolution in the PCRCh journal Espártaco. It noted that the editorial “points out that the Chinese revolution which achieved victory in 1949 and the Soviet October Socialist Revolution are ‘events of the greatest importance for mankind which took place in the present era. They represent the victory in creatively applying scientific socialism by Lenin and Mao Tse-tung, the two most distinguished students of Marx and Engels.’”
The editorial then noted the “two entirely different directions being taken by the USSR and China. “In the Soviet Union, a group of representatives of the privileged stratum which has usurped state power has betrayed the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism and is accelerating the restoration of capitalism and facilitating the infiltration by imperialism, whereas in China, under the leadership of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, a handful of counter-revolutionary revisionists are being weeded out and a new communist generation is being tempered in the great proletarian cultural revolution.”[243]
In its early years, the PCRCh was thought to be heavily subsidized by the Chinese. It was able to maintain headquarters in various parts of the country, and one unfriendly observer claimed that in the province of Talca it had an office and a paid regional delegate, although the party had few members in that are.[244]
At the time of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the PCRCh, in marked contrast to the Communist Party of Chile, strongly condemned the invasion. A statement of the National Executive Committee of the PCRCh, issued on August 23, 1968, said, “Neither the Soviet State nor the Czechoslovakian State is led by Communists, but by camarillas and renegades of MarxismLeninism and by enemies of the proletarian world revolution. The policy of both Governments has been directed to reestablishing capitalism in their countries to the benefit of their respective bureaucratic bourgeoisies. The military invasion ordered by the directing camarilla of the USSR in the Czechoslovakian territory corresponded to its chauvinist policy of a great power and not to the defense of the proletarian regime, corresponds to its eagerness for expansion and dominion, and its conception of the world as zones to be divided between the USSR and Yankee imperialism.”[245]
Early in the following year, an unidentified leader of the PCRCh granted an interview to Desafío, organ of the then Maoist Progressive Labor Party of the United States. Desafío’s report on that interview began: “Only by applying Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tse-tung thought to the practice of the Chilean revolution in accord with the concrete and specific conditions of the country and unfolding the struggle against Yankee imperialism, the great landowners and the monopolistic sectors of the bourgeoisie, can the revolutionary Chilean people conduct the Chilean revolution to victory.”
This unnamed leader of the Partido Comunista Revolucionario de Chile said that the party “has arisen to direct the struggle of the Chilean proletariat and people destined to effectively realize the revolution in Chile.” Clearly criticizing the Communist Party of Chile, this PCRCh spokesman said that “some people… create the illusion among the masses and their militants with the socalled ‘pacific’ or ‘electoral’ way to Power, which only exists in their imagination. They spread the false hope that by obtaining more votes than the reactionaries, the latter will agree ‘pacifically’ to turn over power and cease to exploit the people. He emphasized that such ‘pacific’ and ‘electoral’ way means in essence putting a brake on the revolutionary struggle of the masses.”[246]
The PCRCh and the Allende Regime
In view of its total rejection of the peaceful road to power, the PCRCh was logical during the election of 1970 when it “called upon the public to abstain from voting for any of the three candidates—including Allende whom it said represented the interests of the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, and the labor aristocracy.” It argued, “The ‘electoral circus’… was the most infamous form of deception in Chile, serving merely as an ‘escape valve’ utilized periodically by reaction in order to prevent confrontation between exploiters and exploited.”[247]
By the time Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity (UP) government came to power at the end of 1970, the principal public figures of the PCRCh were Juan Báez and Robinson Rojas, editor of the periodical Causa Marxista-Leninista, who was for some time Chilean correspondent of the New China News Agency. Under the leadership of these men and their associates in the National Executive Committee, the party continued to oppose and deprecate the Popular Unity regime. It was reported that the party considered the UP to be “a new grouping set up to carry out the reformist policies begun in Chile 20 years ago.” It argued that the Communist Party of Chile “sought to seize complete control of the UP and to drag it into increasingly conciliatory and opportunistic positions. The PCCh wanted unity with the ‘pro-Yankee reformists’ of the PDC (Christian Democratic Party) and the armed forces in order to develop capitalism in Chile and promote the exploitation of the Chilean people by both U.S. and Soviet imperialisms...”[248]
The PCRCh reportedly lost some membership in the wake of Allende’s victory in the 1970 election and the establishment of the UP government, as well as a result of Allende’s move to recognize the People’s Republic of China. However, it was reported that “The PCRCh has probably been most influential in land seizures by the poor; among university students in Santiago, where it has participated in the Revolutionary Student Front… and in the South.”[249]
Nevertheless, the results of the party’s participation in trade union and student elections in 1971 and 1972 indicated that its popular backing was very small. When the Central Union of Workers of Chile (CUTCh) held its congress December 1971, the PCRCh attacked the “bourgeois” line of the organization under the leadership of its Communist Party President, Luis Figueroa. Subsequently, in elections for the CUTCh leadership, the PCRCh sought to get Clotario Blest, a former President of the organization and more a Fidelista than a Maoist, to run for the office once again; when he refused, it supported José Reyes. The PCRCh ran its own candidates for other offices in the CUTCh, getting only 3,216 votes and no positions on the National Leadership Council.
240
Cecil Johnson,
244
Interview with Oscar Waiss, onetime Trotskyite, Socialist, and MIR leader, in Santiago, Chile, July 3, 1969.
245
247
William E. Ratliff, in
248
William E. Ratliff, in